Ah, ok, totally my bad. I had the wrong context around "trick" I thought you were referring to our business and not a potential method we used to uncover social data.
On an totally unrelated note Cassie says "Hi" - I was at her place for one of her roommates bday's and I was on his computer responding to this thread and she's like OMG jfarmer is that who you're talking with... such a small world.
I'm not sure "trick" is a fair assessment, why do you think it's a trick? We don't scrape Facebook for data, but use a variety of data providers for most of our social information.
Businesses that care about their customers / users / clients are the ones that will win in 2010 and beyond. I want to be apart of this future and it's the basis for why @danmartell and I founded Flowtown.
Being completely bootstrapped we've been focused on revenue since day 1 and our "trick" of turning emails into social profiles is our minimum monetizable product.
The current iteration of Flowtown is nowhere close to our final vision: helping businesses scale caring.
We launched with an MVP that had even less features than today's iteration (product is just 9 weeks old).
Awesome case study. Totally what we did with our new pivot
(same market B2C Customers - Saas), that is now in the works (didn't do this first time around, and paid for it). Only difference, we told the customer that these were just high fidelity screen mockups for the product we will eventually be building.
Get your screens in front of customers before you ever code. It is mind BLOWING!
Wonder how well this would work for consumer web... thoughts?